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New Data Transmission Speed Record
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmag is reporting that a team of German and Japanese scientists have collaborated to shatter the world record for data transmission speed. From the article: "By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower."
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What kind of measurement is that? Why can't we use something everyone understands like u-haul trucks full of dvd's driving 100 kilometers per fortnight*10^(-6)?
For the uninitiated, that's a microfortnight.
Wow, converting to MPAA units that's 300 years of jail time per second! Smokin!
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
You think wrong. Some quotes from the Wikipedia entry:
In recent years, the use of a byte to mean 8 bits is nearly ubiquitous
Meaning even today it's not universal.
A contiguous sequence of binary bits in a serial data stream, such as in modem or satellite communications, or from a disk-drive head, which is the smallest meaningful unit of data. These bytes might include start bits, stop bits, or parity bits, and thus could vary from 7 to 12 bits to contain a single 7-bit ASCII code.
Here I think is the most revealing definition for the discussion in the present context.
The eight-bit byte is often called an octet in formal contexts such as industry standards, as well as in networking and telecommunication, in order to avoid any confusion about the number of bits involved.
Another site says that:
* Pre-1965, and including the IBM 701, bytes were almost always 6 bits, though they weren't called that much then, but rather characters.
* 9 bits were sometimes used
* The PDP-6, PDP-10, and DECsystem 20 all supported changing the byte size with instructions from 1 to 36 bits (probably only some of those)
The latter reference, looking up the PDP-10 on Wikipedia, gives this quote:
Some aspects of the instruction set are still considered unsurpassed, most notably the "byte" instructions, which operated on arbitrary sized bit-fields (at that time a byte was not necessarily eight bits)
...and in related news, the spokesman for the MPAA is currently unable to comment due to suffering a heart attack.
At 100Km/hour, a truck would require 1.6 hours * 60^2 seconds/hour = 5,760 seconds to travel 160 kilometers. At 60 DVDs/second, the truck would have to be carrying 5760*60 = 345,600 DVDs to have equivalent bandwidth. A typical DVD in a case is 14cm wide, 19cm tall, and 1.5cm thick, for a total volume of 399 cm^3 (lets round to 400cm^3). Therefore, the truck would have to have a cargo volume of 400cm^3 * 345,600 = 138,240,000cm^3, or 138.24m^3.
Now, typical intermodal containers (as used on big rig trucks) are 8.5' by 8.5' by 40', or 2890ft^3. Converted to metric, this is about 82m^3, which is less than the 138.24m^3 required.
In other words, no, a truck full of DVDs is NOT faster than this connection!*
*unless you put the DVDs on spindles instead of in cases.
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